Friday, June 30, 2017

Staunton, June 30 – Vladimir Putin’s
maternal capital program has done little to boost birthrates in Russia, but that
should not have come as a surprise as pro-natalist programs even far better
funded in other countries have not succeeded in doing so either.But the program is valuable, Aleksey
Mikhailov says, because it has limited poverty among Russian children.

International experience shows, the
Moscow analyst says, that governments can have an impact on demographic
behavior but more on the negative than the positive side. Thus, China’s
one-child policy worked, but well-funded European programs to boost birthrates
have not (profile.ru/economics/item/118170-kupit-rebenka).

Indeed, Mikhaylov says, there are almost
no examples of successful programs to boost birthrates. Instead, there are two
common trends: “the better people live, the fewer children they have” but at
the same time, if people become poorer, they also will have fewer
children.In short, to influence
demographic behavior in a positive way is almost impossible.

But that doesn’t mean that Moscow
should, as some are now suggesting, eliminate or severely cut the maternal
capital program. Instead, the analyst argues, Russians should see it as helping
to address “the traditional tasks of social policy, the reduction of the level
of poverty and inequality.”

Indeed, understood in this way, the
maternal capital program should be expanded because while it does not do
enough, it can prevent many children and their parents from falling into
poverty.That is a noble goal, and it is
one that far too few Russian government programs are now focused on.

Staunton, June 30 -- After ignoring
the issues of military pay and benefits for both serving and retiring personnel
for five years, during the course of which pay and pensions stagnated and
medical services were cut, Vladimir Putin last week said he wanted to boost pay
and provide more benefits to uniformed personnel and retirees.

But budgetary stringencies seem
certain to get in the way, making it difficult to raise pay or pensions
significantly and especially to provide the housing and medical care that
soldiers and sailors are promised both while in uniform and after they retire,
according to Vladimir Mukhin (ng.ru/kartblansh/2017-06-30/3_7019_kartblansh.html).

Increasing
the capacity of the military and special services has been a central goal for
Putin, but he has focused more on equipment than on personnel. Last week,
however, he indicated that improving the siloviki will require “the further
improvement of the material and social stimuli” they receive.

“We
will continue to be concerned about he strengthening of social guarantees for
military personnel, officers of the law-enforcement organs and special
services. We will further guarantee worthy pay, offer housing, and raise the quality
of medical services for military personnel and members of their families,” the
Kremlin leader said.

But
since last making such declarations five years ago, Putin has done little in
this sector. Military pay hasn’t been indexed to inflation even once, housing
remains in critically short supply for officers, and having cut the military
medical system to the bone, the government now wants to reduce spending on that
function as well, the Nezavisimaya gazeta
journalist says.

Putin
has begun to focus on these issues not only because he is about to take part in
another political campaign but also because he wants to shore up support for
himself among the siloviki, Mukhin continues, convinced as he is that the
United States is seeking to achieve “regime change” in the Russian Federation.

But
the question arises: Can the Russian budget support such things given the
continuing economic crisis?Neither the
2017 nor the 2018-2019 budgets call for raising pay of soldiers and officers of
law enforcement agencies and special services. In fact, the budget calls for
cutting back spending on defense overall.

To
boost pay would require shifting funds from somewhere else, and there are too
few places where that could happen, the journalist suggests.At the same time, the uniformed services have
many social needs which aren’t now being met and which could be addressed only
if more money were directed at them.

Duma
deputies have already expressed concerns that the absence of pay increases and
problems with benefits has led many in the uniformed services to leave their
positions early, something that adds to training costs and makes it more
difficult to maintain unit cohesion and readiness.

A
major problem is medical care. As a result of cutbacks in recent years, there
is not a single military medical facility in 47 of the country’s federal
subjects “where live more than 350,000 military pensioners.” And the number of
hospitals, polyclinics, and other treatment centers for serving military
personnel has been cut dramatically.

The
number of military clinics has been reduced from 173 to 41 and the number of
military medical personnel has been cut from 13,000 to 2500 in recent years.
Obviously something needs to be done, but the finance ministry maintains that
spending on military medical needs is still too high.

“Vladimir
Putin has promised ‘to raise the quality of medical services for military personnel
and members of their families,’ Mukhin says. But how can he deal with military
pensioners in this regard “who also have the right to be treated in military
medical facilities?”The answer to that
is “unknown.”

Staunton, June 28 – In most
countries when the economic situation deteriorates or the government behaves in
ways that fail to help the population out, an increasing number of people turn
against the government and its leadership and demand either changes in policies
or even changes in the leadership itself.

But in Russia, the relationships
between the economy and the state, on the one hand, and the population, on the
other, is very different. There polls and analysts suggest, the worse things
become in the economy and in government policy, the more Russians look to the
state and especially to the supreme leader for salvation.

A Gazeta commentary suggests this represents “a paternalistic scheme
in action: the worse Russians live – and a new VTsIOM survey finds 40 percent of them
do not have enough money even for food and clothing – the greater the hopes
they place in the state” (gazeta.ru/comments/2017/06/29_e_10754009.shtml#page3).

“For officials,” the paper
continues, “such a state of affairs is natural: they in general consider the
social sphere their undivided possession, while citizens fear rather to lose
the little that they still have and believe in a miracle” worked by the state,
as a new study by the Higher School of Economics confirms (gazeta.ru/business/2017/06/28/10741787.shtml).

And Russians feel this way even when
most Russians think the state is not doing its job because they are certain that
any change could end by making things worse.And that explains the pattern of public activity: 50,000 people in
Russia as a whole protest corruption, but 250,000 in Moscow alone pray at
Ramadan and almost a million stand in line to see a saint’s relics.

A Russian blogger, Anatoly Nesmiyan,
supplements this observation in a post entitled “Total Poverty in a Stable
Putinist Russia” in which he suggests that the authorities are successfully
deploying lies to suggest that there are no general problems but only a few
specific ones in a few places (krizis-kopilka.ru/archives/42204).

That
was what Putin’s “Direct Line” program was all about: showing that the
president could address very specific problems. But that in turn shows that
neither he nor his regime intend either to analyze the situation as a whole or
to adopt policies designed to ameliorate the impact of it on the population as
a whole.

And
what that means, Nesmiyan continues, is that the population is going to become
ever poorer even as it listens to the government’s message that everything is
somehow getting better and better. When that becomes unsustainable is anyone’s
guess, but it is certainly far further in the future in Russia than it would be
in other countries.